Terrible customer service experience

I’m exhausted by the lack of capable people in AT&T customer service department and their website. I’ve had a technical and billing issue going on 3 months now with no resolution. It started when I ordered NBA League Pass from the website. The site stated that you could pay for it in installments but when you hit pay it charged me the entire $200 right away. I called them to get this corrected and that’s when the nightmare began. I was on the phone for over 40 mins with someone who had no clue how to answer my simple payment question. I was so frustrated I told them to just remove NBA Pass from my account, which she said she couldn’t do(or didn’t know how). I was then told that NBA Pass came free with my package anyway, which was odd but ok, and that everything should be fine(I believe I was told this on my second call, it’s blurry now since I talked to them so many times). I had NBA Pass for a total of 3 days and then it stopped working and I noticed the $200 was still on my bill. So I called back again, was on the call for over 40 mins trying to get the person to understand my issue. Which was that 1) I was told it was no charge, 2) regardless of the charge, IT’S NOT WORKING! The person couldnt grasp it and continued to place me on hold over 15 times with the same scripted apology every time. When I asked to escalate to a supervisor I would get placed on hold immediately for a few mins, the person would come back and apologize for the wait, and then put me on hold again. Totally ignoring my request to escalate. It got to a point where I would try to time my request to escalate to coincide with their apology just to confirm that they had to hear me, but were just ignoring my request to escalate. I literally practically yelled “Why are you ignoring me?!?!” only to get the same “Sorry for the wait, thank you for your patience” apology. The support staff is so robotically scripted that they can’t have a regular conversation or go off script to analyze a problem.

This experience was repeated on several other support calls(all over 30 mins) without resolution. It was beyond frustrating because at this point all I wanted was to get the $200 removed since I had long given up on getting NBA Pass to actually work. Sounds simple right?

So I figured the only way to get some help would be to turn off my auto pay. Which of course led to them calling me once my payment was late. Finally I got someone who was not scripted and he understood my problem. We were able to have a real conversation but he was also unable to resolve the issue. However, he told me to just pay my internet and cable portion of the bill and don’t worry about the extra $200 as he would notate my account. But I would have to call back later. However the $200 remained on my bill (almost 2 months and multiple excruciating support calls have passed by this point). Of course when I called back I ran into the same rabbit hole of non-service. So now its almost 3 months later (February) and to date I have no NBA Pass and still have a past due of $200. My bill is up again and I only paid the internet and cable portion so I expect a call from them in a few days asking me again about the $200 past due.

It’s unbelievable that after all this time and all these calls 1) I couldn’t get my issue escalated to a manager, 2)only had one or 2 coherent conversations, 3)could not get the technical issue resolved of NBA Pass not working, 4) Could not get the $200 removed from my bill. I’ve given up on getting support and have an in-person appointment scheduled to cancel my subscription. I would have done the in-person earlier but my work schedule wouldn’t allow it. Now I won’t be surprised if I’m charged a penalty for canceling my subscription before 12 months.

This has been an inexcusable, nightmare of organizational ineptitude for a very simple problem.